Right after Special Counsel Robert Mueller racked up yet another guilty plea to a false-statements charge on Thursday, a friend asked me, "Doesn’t this destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness?"
Easier to destroy Satan’s conscience, I thought. Cohen would have to have some credibility before it could be destroyed, and how much could reside in a self-described "fixer" who openly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the lawyer-gangster in The Godfather? (I’ll stipulate that he has a law degree, but Cohen has always struck me as the Fredo of Trump World.)
Nevertheless, the flaw in my friend’s question was not the assumption that Cohen had some smidgeon of value as a witness until it was extirpated by his plea of guilty to lying to Congress (after he had already, in August, pled guilty lying to a financial institution, among other fraudulence). The real flaw was the assumption that Special Counsel Mueller is lining up witnesses and building a criminal case, as prosecutors do.
He is not.
No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, "Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars."?
